Teleportation
"What we got back didn't live long. Fortunately." :- From an early test of the Scrambler The Scrambler The Red Chinese were not the only ones developing hideous weaponry to finally end their war. The Blue Chinese were no less determined, and developed something extraordinary to blitz the Reds right back, with hideous results. One of the chief problems with the Nationalist Revolutionary Army was its lack of mobility, with most of its tanks and artillery hugging the ground. To get around this, the Blue Chinese threatened to shoot the families of the few remaining scientists of China unless they came up with a way to move forces by methods quicker than by ground, air, or sea. Fortunately, one of them had worked on the Chronosphere and was able to convince Chiang Kai-shek that he might be able to make a teleporter of some sort out of the resources he had. Pleased, the scientists were left to their work, hoping to master what the Allies had taken decades to begin to understand. Their first attempt only succeeded at sending a beam of light back three seconds before it shorted out and melted. Throwing out the time travel component entirely, they instead worked on a system of shifting a person from one point to another. Testing on inanimate objects was cancelled when Chiang Kai-shek learned that Mao Zedong would be inspecting troops at the front within estimated operational distance in a few days. Instead, Bruce Chen, the janitor, was loaded into the infernal machine to be teleported from one pad to another to test its feasibility. After a great humming of the machines, Chen disappeared in a flash, and on the other pad materialized a pile of bloody flesh, exposed organs, and jutting bones, which quickly exploded due to gases trapped within, spraying viscera over the horrified technicians. Kai-shek himself wiped what was once a man off his epaulette in shock, stunned silence ... and anger. The Nationalists scrapped the teleporter idea entirely. Instead, the machine was retooled to teleport an object to its exact same position, scrambling its molecules as it had done with Chen until it no longer resembled anything it once was. The machine, dubbed the Scrambler, was copied and built in a few Blue Chinese bases, which soon became almost invincible against attack by the Red Chinese. Red Guardsmen were immediately turned into shuddering piles of flesh in the presence of their screaming comrades. Tanks were no less affected, as machines were fused with their pilots in a flash. Even airplanes could be brought down by extreme disturbances of air, even if they were not hit directly. The Scrambler was such an effective weapon even the Atomic Chinese had difficulty taking Bruce Chen Memorial Armoury, one of the last major bases the Blue Chinese held. Entire clone squads were fused together, and shields offered no proof against the Scrambler. Only the crafty infiltration of a Courtesan, playing the part of a poor girl in need of rescue, allowed the Scrambler to be shut off and the base to be destroyed entirely. The Scrambler itself, however, was salvaged. Being the last of its kind, it was reverse engineered by Atomic Chinese engineers, and ways to turn it into a true teleporter were devised. The Hellmouth Mere teleportation, while useful, wasn't the end all of the Atomic Chinese's use of forbidden technology from the Civil War. After the bombs, the resources of the Atomic Kingdom were scarce, at best. What trees were left could scarcely be considered wood, and the ore underground was under a thick layer of atomic glass, if not melted itself by the intense heat of the splitting of the atom. While they could produce ample men, not even the impressive martial arts of unarmed clones could hope to take their revenge upon the world. However, the Red Chinese had similar problems before, due less to the lack of resources of China and more to incompetence and insane mismanagement, which was the beginning, and the end, of the machine called the Hellmouth. The Soviet Union had noticed that many Red Chinese were starving due to the army seizing all foods in regions. As a sign of solidarity to fellow communists (and maybe even as an act of charity), the Soviet Union built and donated a maglev between major Red Chinese cities and farming areas, so that food and other supplies could quickly be transported to those who needed it. The Soviets even negotiated with the Allies to not bomb it, as they had received promises from the Red Chinese that it would never be used for military purposes. Satisfied, both powers let the maglev be, hoping it would solve many humanitarian crises. Barely after the last Soviet official left, Mao Zedong ordered it dismantled and all the magnetic equipment retooled to something useful, leaving the task to his technicians. The only thing left of the maglev was the concrete pylons, which stretches across the northern parts of the wasteland like a cyclopean fence. In time, it was discovered that with the proper placement and power to the magnetic plates, anything could be ripped apart into its constituent elements. While the machine itself was the size of a building and thus useless in combat, with some work anything could be salvaged. Tanks and other metal things could be reduced to their constituent metal and resmelted, but the Hellmouth didn't truly earn its name until some soulless officer suggested that battlefields were literally layered with resources. The dead, both Communists and Nationalists, soldiers and civilians, were gathered from every battlefield, atrocity, and mass grave that the Red Chinese could reach and heaped in large wagons. These were brought to the local Hellmouths (though the distance could be many miles) and thrown in. The human body is mostly water (meaning the Hellmouths constantly steamed), but otherwise is made of mostly carbon, a very useful resource. Coal could be used as a heat source, graphite used in electronics, or it could simply reduce it to an organic slurry that could feed rapidly aging clones that required almost constant intake. One of the most menacing uses was to turn corpses into rough diamonds that were smuggled out of the country and sold to unscrupulous sources to fund the Red Chinese. These diamonds, due to their ghastly origins, were dubbed "Blood Diamonds" by the media. Hellmouths themselves were priority targets for Nationalist atom bombs, and none survive to this day. However, enough material was written about their construction and operation that the Atomic Chinese were able to create their own. They found their own tractor beams to work much better than some secondhand Soviet technology, working more quickly and also allowing for the machines to be made smaller. With them, the Atomic Chinese were able to salvage destroyed vehicles and spent war materiel, process ore with unmatched speed, and recycle their resources with unparalleled efficiency. The machines do require a huge amount of power to operate, though power is the one thing the Atomic Chinese have in abundance. The Atomic Chinese respect human life too much to harvest dead foes from the battlefield. Clones, however, are a different matter. However, it would take the mating of the Scrambler and the Hellmouth to truly revolutionise warfare. The Teleporter The Atomic Chinese first used it as a way to move entire infantry divisions in the blink of an eye on a large scale, the Chinese quickly applied the technology to their air superiority fighter and later to other vehicles as well. Whether this is feasible or not for their star ships is unconfirmed however as the Chinese are developing something called "Warp Drive" this is unlikely. However all Chinese ship possesses a "Transporter Pad" that allows infantry units to "beam" down onto any place the ship can lock on to. A number of philosophical questions were raised when this technology became widespread however. As the "original" body gets disintegrated, for instance, would that mean that the person is in essence dead? If something goes wrong with the teleportation, where does the person end up? Would it be possible for two people to be formed as a result from teleportation? As of yet, the Atomic Kingdom isn't talking about any of these questions as for the most part, all it uses are clones which are, essentially, expendable and if something goes wrong, it doesn't matter for them. Category:Technology